


That Which Remains

by glorious_spoon



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Broken Bones, Grief/Mourning, Immortality, Other, Podfic Available, Pre-Relationship, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25392856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: “This is what we get to keep. This, and each other.”Andy and Nile, talking about mothers and scars and what remains.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Nile Freeman
Comments: 49
Kudos: 230





	That Which Remains

When she’s nine years old, Nile breaks her arm for the first time.

It’ll be the first of countless broken bones, and injuries far more gruesome than that, but she won’t learn that for another twenty years. In that moment the pain is a sudden shock that jolts her so hard that for a moment she can’t even breathe. Jamal Henry, who was laughing in victorious glee a moment ago, spins around at the noise that leaves her when she hits the pavement, his eyes going wide. He lets the soccer ball go to bounce off the side of the building as he scrambles to her.

“Nile? Nile, oh shit, Nile—somebody get her ma—”

Nile drags a breath in, then swings weakly at him as he falls to his knees next to her. Her knuckles glance off his shoulder; he doesn’t even seem to notice. There are footsteps in the distance, the other kids scurrying across the courtyard for her building.

“Don’t go thinking this means you won,” she says.

“That’s what you’re thinking about?” he asks incredulously. “Really, that’s it?”

She starts to lift her other arm, and a stab of blinding pain whites out her vision. On the heels of it is something else, though: a kind of warm _pulling_ sensation that doesn’t hurt at all. Nile blinks through the tears clouding her vision, but then Jamal is helping her to sit up and telling her that she’ll be okay in a tone that sounds even more upset than Nile feels, and she’s too busy trying not to cry from the pain to think about it anymore.

It’s not until her mother comes storming out of their building like an avenging angel in yoga pants and a purple head wrap and gathers Nile up into her arms that she bursts into tears. By that point, somebody’s already running around to the back lot to get their car and her mom is petting her back and rocking her, and Nile nuzzles her wet snotty face into her shoulder for the familiar, comforting smell of menthol lites and drugstore perfume.

It’ll be years before she remembers the double-take that the ER doctor does at her X-ray. Years later, when ancient, unbreakable people are pulling her from the wreckage of a car and what used to be a man’s body, she’ll watch her joints re-align, broken bones repairing themselves with that same strange pull, she’ll wonder what the image showed.

At nine years old, though, she’s just happy with her bright blue cast and the way Jamal writes ‘SORRY’ in huge letters across the top. She’s happier two weeks later when the cast comes off and she’s able to dribble the ball neatly past him and into the goal three times in a row.

* * *

“Did we heal faster before?”

Andy lifts her head from the couch cushion, then pushes herself upright in a quick graceful motion. There’s no sign of pain, but that doesn’t mean anything. Nile was the one who helped her change the dressing earlier. She knows it’s got to be hurting like hell, but Andy doesn’t give anything away. “What?”

“Before we died the first time, I mean.” Nile gestures vaguely into the dim space of the apartment, which overlooks a pocket of green and a small concrete-lined brook in central London. Technically, it belongs to Nicky and Joe, but they’ve made themselves scarce today, and it’s just her and Andy here. Nile has been spending the time reading, and resting, and… just, coping, or trying to. Andy has mostly been sleeping. Eventually, it’ll probably feel stifling, but for now there’s a sense of timeless peace to the place that soothes her.

Nicky and Joe probably know that, too. Or Nicky does, at least. He’s the gentlest of them, in his way.

“Why do you ask?” Andy says.

“I don’t know,” Nile says, which is a lie that Andy calls her on with a silent, skeptical arch of her brow. Nile sighs. “Okay, I’m trying to distract myself. Copley called earlier. He said—he said that my mom was notified today.”

She’s trying very hard not to think about that. About her mom opening the door to the uniformed Marine, about her brother coming home from school to the news. It’s only now, at the point of it, that she can accept what a cruel thing it is that she’s done. And it doesn’t really help that she could catch a flight back to O’Hare tomorrow and walk up to the door of the apartment that she grew up in and tell her mom that it was all just a big mistake—

That would be even crueler, in the long run. But it’s very goddamn tempting right now.

“Oh,” Andy says, on a soft breath.

“So, yeah. Do we heal faster when we’re still, you know. Human?”

Andy snorts but doesn’t protest the wording. She looks past Nile for a moment, one of those strange distant looks that Nile is starting to recognize as Andy sifting through the layers of her impossibly long life, digging for memories. After a little while, though, she shakes her head. “I don’t remember anymore. You could ask Joe or Nicky, or—”

She breaks off before she can say ‘Booker’. Nile doesn’t acknowledge the slip. Of the four of them, Booker is maybe the only one who _would_ remember for sure, but it’s not like asking him is exactly an option now.

“I broke my arm when I was nine. We were playing soccer outside my building, and my friend Jamal knocked me down—it was an accident. He’s a sweet guy. We dated for a hot minute in high school, before he figured out he was gay.” She doesn’t even know why she’s telling Andy this. Why she’s thinking about it at all, when it’s a life that’s been cut off as surely as if she’d died for real in Afghanistan. It feels like she’s mourning her own self. In a way, she guesses she is. “Doctor said I’d probably need physical therapy, which was not great since we were pretty broke, but… it healed. Couple of weeks later I was fine. It could have just been luck.”

“Or it could have been something else.”

“Yeah.”

Andy is silent for a while. Nile just watches her, her sharp profile drawn against the dusk coming in through the closed curtains, her strong shoulders and hands and the fall of her short dark hair. She’s in a sports bra and sweatpants that leave her torso bare, the dressing taped against her side where Booker’s bullet nearly did what millennia of warfare couldn’t and killed her for real.

Finally, she stretches her hands out, palms down, into the space over the coffee table that sits between them. “Here. This was from a fish-hook. This—” she waves one hand to gesture at the knuckles of the other. “This was hot grease from helping my mother at the cooking fires. I don’t remember how long it took to heal. But I remember that I cried.” There’s the brief flash of a smile. “I was very young. I cried, and she rocked me in her lap and sang to me. I don’t remember her face, but I remember that.”

“Oh,” Nile says, softly. It feels like the word has been punched out of her. She leans forward, and sure enough there’s a pale _vee_ on one hand where she can imagine a fish hook digging in and tearing back through flesh and skin; on the other is a discolored mark across the knuckles. Mundane scars, the kind of childhood scars that anybody ends up with. That anybody’s mother might rock them in her lap and sing to them over.

“This is what we get to keep. This, and each other.” Andy looks up with a faint smile. “At least for a while.”

“Yeah,” Nile says softly. She feels like she might cry, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. “Yeah, okay.”

She runs her thumb over the old scatter of pockmarks where her elbow hit the hot pavement in a Chicago summer now decades gone. It’s proof of something. Proof, maybe, that she’s still real.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] That Which Remains](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26383291) by [semperfiona_podfic (semperfiona)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperfiona/pseuds/semperfiona_podfic)




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